How Does My Child’s Brain Work?

Melissa is bringing you Tuesday’s post today, as Patrick is on vacation.

Eric Jenson was a pretty wise bird who wrote, “Many learners who seem apathetic would be very enthusiastic if the learning was offered in their preferred style.” This would really help the little people if us big people were careful to keep it in mind when dealing with our different learners!

Yesterday you read some quick tips to help you get an idea of the type of learner your child might be by paying attention to what they’re naturally drawn to do in their free time.

Today, you’ll be getting a couple of quick tips that you can try with your kiddo to see if your observations were right on. Try one of these strategies according to your hunch. If the technique works for your peanut, you probably solved the case. If it doesn’t, don’t worry! We’ll be giving you more ways to get to the bottom of what type of learner your child is throughout the month.

Auditory Learner

Have them talk about their answers to questions. This will help our chatty Cathy’s store info in their long-term memory.

Teach them to read hard parts aloud in any subject.

Help them find a quiet spot to do homework. They’ll be less distracted and more able to focus.

Visual Learners

After reading, have them draw a picture, graph, or chart about what they read. This is a helpful and fun way for visual learners to store information in their long-term memory.

Give them with colored pencils and highlighters of different colors so they can highlight important parts in their reading. Color coding will help them remember much more easily (it will also make reading more fun!).

Teach your visual learner to really study charts, maps, graphs, and diagrams that are given in a text to help explain concepts. They are much more likely to remember the image than the paragraphs of text under it!

Kinesthetic Learners

If they need to memorize something (times tables, spelling words, etc.), have them walk and repeat what they have to memorize over and over. Getting physical will help cement these facts in their brain!

Teach them how to take notes when hearing a lesson. The physical act of writing will help our movers retain more.

Think Kit-Kat’s. Giving our wiggle worms many breaks actually keeps them more focused! I know it’s easy to think that taking breaks will destroy momentum, but giving them a little breather actually keeps these guys on task.

We want our kids to be flexible when it comes to learning, so we don’t recommend you label your kid and think that’s the best, or only, way for them to learn. Far from it. This is a starting place to give your kid the best and easiest results.

We would love to hear how these tips work for you.

We would also love to hear some strategies that work for you or your child’s learning style.

Melissa is the founder of Tandem Teaching and teaches in the inner-city. She blogs weekly about tips parents can implement to enhance their connection with their children and ways to bring out their children’s inherent gifts. Contact her for a private consulting session.